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A Global Coffee Shortage May Be Brewing

Caffeine addicts, get ready to pay a little more for your morning (or evening) coffee hit because multiple reports have surfaced today which say there’s a very real threat of a global coffee shortage in the coming years. Okay, so it isn’t right now, but there is real (scary) potential for it to happen in the future. There’s no need to look so smug, tea drinkers.

According to the Independent, there are multiple reasons why coffee beans are under threat. The first is that more people around the world are guzzling more coffee than ever before, which means that there will need to be 40 to 50 million more bags produced in the next 10 years to keep up with demand (we knew we shouldn’t have been drinking so many of those gorgeous Pumpkin Spiced Lattes).

Andrea Illy, the chairperson and chief executive officer of Illycafe confirmed that the growing number of coffee drinkers in developing economies is putting pressure on global production, which will need to rise by an extra 50 million bags in the next decade, and that’s just to keep just to keep up with current demand. That’s more than the entire crop of Brazil, according to Bloomberg.

Much of that new demand comes from China, where a growing middle class has led to a 13.8 percent spike in sales.

Bloomberg reported that the growing issue of climate change wasn’t helping, because rising temperatures will affect farms around the world.

Last year, the world reportedly had a shortage of 6.4 million bags of coffee, but it’s not as bad this year, at only 3.5 million bags. A group of the industry’s top producers are also said meeting in Milan to figure out how to keep those beloved beans coming. “Sooner or later, in months or years, we’ll have to make a bold decision about what to do,” she added. “We don’t know where this coffee will come from.”

While we know there’s no need for panic stations quite yet, it’s staggering to think that millions upon millions of bags will need to be produced in a small number of years to ensure coffee stays readily available. We know that this will affect more than just us humble coffee drinkers if the beans dry up but in the meantime, there’s always tea, right?